Indefensible (21 page)

He looks at me vacantly a few seconds, then says, “I just figured you guys would convict Scud. Of course he told me he didn't do it, but I never believed him. I figured you'd try him, I'd defend him, you'd win; goodbye, Scud. But you guys kept screwing up, and there were all these holes in your case, and you couldn't even get any charges to stick.”

“He sounded scared on the phone.”

“Of course. They were after him. He'd become too hot.”

“How'd you get your phone back?”

“Special Agent d'Villafranca called me at home, told me about the cell phone and how he threatened you. I immediately call my cell phone, and damned if Scud doesn't answer. I laid right into him about stealing my phone, and we arranged to meet at the Toadstool. I didn't expect him to show, but . . .”

“Where's the Toadstool?”

“West of town on 156, about twenty miles. So damned if Scud didn't show up. Right on time, too. Gave me my phone, all sheepish. I told him to turn himself in on this bullshit about threatening a federal officer. He said he'd think about it. And that's the last I saw of Scud Illman.”

“Did he say where he was going after that?”

“No. I left, he stayed.”

“You might be the last one who saw him alive.”

“Except for whoever killed him.”

“Right. Except for whoever killed him.”

Kendall looks tired. His commando bearing has slumped into a sunken-necked, bent-backed weariness. He leans heavily on his elbows, and I see how earnestly he wears that confession about the burdens of criminal defense. Again I feel unexpectedly fond of him. It is Kendall's job to defend the indefensible, forgive the unforgivable, and in this instance anyway, grieve for the tragically flawed journeyer whose cause he took up. I mumble niceties, trying to penetrate his sudden gloom, but I'm unsuccessful. As I go out the
door, Kendall barely looks up from the blackness of his coffee-cup reflection.

•  •  •

Back at my office, midafternoon: Janice is away from her desk, so I slip in quietly, close the door, and pretend I'm not here. I play the voice mail I left for myself, writing down the numbers dialed from Kendall's phone. I fax the list over to the Bureau, and a half hour later, they fax it back with the numbers identified. Calls were made to:

1. A landline listed to Kendall and Linda Vance. This is probably Kendall calling his wife before Scud took the phone.

2. A landline listed to the law office of Kendall Vance. Kendall calling his office.

3. A landline registered to the law office of Newman, Welch, and Zemp. Kendall calling a colleague.

4. A landline registered to Avery Illman. This is Kendall calling Scud at home, or Scud calling his wife on the newly pilfered phone.

5. A prepaid cell phone traced to the name Maxfield Parrish, which is certainly an alias. The call lasted twenty minutes and was placed at 5:41
P.M.
on Friday.

6. A cell phone belonging to Upton Cruthers. This is disturbing. The call lasted thirty-four minutes and was placed at 7:52
P.M.
Upton never told me that he, too, got a call from Scud last Friday. It gives some credibility to Scud's claim that he and Upton had something going.

7. A landline registered to Bernier Construction, Inc. Nine minutes.

8. A cell phone belonging to Nick Davis. Me. The call lasted thirteen minutes.

9. Maxfield Parrish again. Seventeen minutes.

10. Bernier Construction again. Eight minutes.

11. Home of Kendall and Linda Vance again.

The only calls of interest, besides the one to Upton, are those to Maxfield Parrish and Bernier Construction. I call Chip and ask him to see what he can find out, though I don't tell him where the numbers came from. I have a sick feeling after seeing the calls Kendall made himself. I have violated my colleague; it goes against everything about attorney confidence.

Midafternoon, the office is quiet, and I didn't sleep last night. My office couch beckons, and I obey.

M
orning: Upton, Tina, and I stop at JoMondo's for coffee. “Upton,” I say, “when was the last time you spoke with Scud before he died?”

“I don't think I ever spoke with him.”

“You spoke with him at his house the day we executed the search.”

“Right. Except for that. Never.”

“Count your blessings,” I say.

Something is strange. Somebody called Upton from Kendall's cell phone last Friday and talked for almost half an hour. Upton says he never got a call from Scud. I'm certain the call was made while Scud had Kendall's phone, but just to be sure, I ask Upton, “Have you spoken to Kendall Vance lately?”

“No, why?”

“No reason.”

We get our drinks and walk toward the FBI. Between office buildings, I glimpse the mills down on the river; always the mills, the givers and takers away. The mills are the rich uncle who, when he lies waxy in open casket, is revealed to be penniless. And you still owe for the undertaker. This is a city of failed nineteenth-century industry trying to bootstrap itself into a twenty-first-century world. Over the past quarter century, our statistics have been grim: child neglect, abuse, assault, DWI, poverty, alcoholism, drug use. We've made the charts, and though we're climbing our way out of the hole, it's a long climb.

The FBI conference room is full. It's a bland room in a bland building. The most notable detail is an old sign on the wall that someone printed out in large font:
MAXY DID IT
. This is a joke. Maxy was an informant who disappeared a decade ago and whose name
has taken on the air of mystery and myth. Perps claim he's active. Unsolved hits get blamed on him.

There are a couple of lawyers here from the state attorney general's office, and Chip's colleague Isler is here with several agents and technicians I don't recognize.

“Whose meeting is this?” Isler asks.

“Mine,” I say. “I want to make sure we all know what everybody else knows. We got four murders. Let's start with Phippin.”

“Chip will be along in a minute,” Isler says. “Let's wait.”

So they stand around talking about other things while I go over my notes and we all wait for Chip. They talk about a “small cluster” of disappearances over in Rivertown. A few kids have gone missing. The problem with these small-cluster cases is that you never know if they're just coincidence or if something evil is afoot. But Rivertown is a pretty rough area, so they may be runaways. “Has there been another?” I ask.

One of the state cops answers, “Not since the Tesoro girl, but she was the third in quick succession.”

“You guys got anything?”

“Cold as ice.”

Chip comes in and sits. “Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all.

“Shall we begin?” I say. “Let's talk about the Phippin boy.”

“A dealer,” Isler says, “small potatoes. He was independent. The big boys wholesaled to him.” He is slender and unimposing, but as soon as he opens his mouth, the nerdiness disappears.

“How do you know where he got his leaf ?”

“State lab traced it. DNA or something.”

“Any reason to think this Phippin deal is something other than what it looks like?”

“No.”

“And what's it look like?”

“A simple execution,” Dorsey says, “but seeing as how he'd been dead at least a day when we found him, maybe whoever killed him isn't who buried him. Maybe the burier was some grunt finishing someone else's dirty work.”

The idea is new to me but it makes sense; upper management takes action, the janitors clean up. “Prospects?” I ask.

“We're dead-ended on forensics right now. Ballistics can't match the gun to anything. We've identified oil paint on Zander's hands and face—artist's oil paints—but it leads us nowhere and probably has nothing to do with the crime. He was obviously held without food, tortured for two to four days. He had abrasions on his wrists from being cuffed to something. That's what we've got. For any more, we'd need to get an informant or find evidence we missed. Or get lucky.”

“Possible informants?”

Dorsey and Chip discuss this. They ask their respective staffs, kick it around. I'm aware of  Tina at the table. She's quiet because this meeting doesn't really involve her; I invited her as a courtesy. If she weren't here, I'd probably let Chip run things. I'm strutting.

“We're working some prospects,” Dorsey says.

“Moving on. Cassandra Randall.”

“A professional job,” Isler says, and he describes the difficulties of the shot, made at some distance and through a window. “We've sent the bullet fragments to the national lab.”

“Anything else?”

Dorsey answers. “A neighbor walking home that night noticed a car parked on the street nearby. White and nondescript. Probably a rental. We've narrowed it to three possible models. We're working the rental data from every outlet in the city.”

“You are?” I say, surprised. “But she was shot last June.”

“Yeah, but until this week, we thought Scud was our guy.”

“So you never—”

“Give me a break,” Upton says. “You heard Isler, it was a professional job. It took planning and talent. Scud didn't have that kind of savvy.”

This stops the conversation dead. For one thing, Upton's outburst bristles with contempt and emotion. For another, the question of turf can be a powder keg to a multiagency investigation. The best way to blow it all up is to start criticizing everyone else's work. It's
not like Upton, and it adds to my growing certainty that he has an agenda of his own.

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn't,” I say. “Other leads?”

Silence.

“Prospects?”

They kick it around. The conversation reduces to the bleak facts that, other than Scud, who is dead and probably wasn't capable of the job, we don't have a suspect for who killed Cassandra—and other than an unidentified white rental car that's probably unrelated, we don't have the remotest shred of a clue.

“Moving on,” I say. “Seth Coen.”

“We're still assuming Scud Illman killed Coen,” Dorsey says.

“What do we know about Coen?”

“A loner. We can't get a feel for him. He did time for manslaughter, and he went on trial once for armed robbery, but the case had problems, and it got dismissed. Other than that, it's misdemeanors. He fought in the first Gulf War and showed up here afterward.”

“Where's he from?”

“Downstate. The only person we connect him to up here is Scud, and barely that. Scud was into all kinds of crap, but it seems Coen stayed pretty much out of it.”

“How'd he support himself ?”

Dorsey shrugs. “He drove a delivery van sometimes. Not too often.”

“Got anything else?”

“He had health problems. The medicine cabinet was full of prescription meds.”

“What problems?”

“We're working on it.”

“Did he have family?”

“A sister someplace.”

“Let me know when you have something. Moving on to Scud Illman.”

“You know everything we know,” Chip says. “He was a wannabe.
It looks like he tried legitimate work a time or two, took business classes at community college, worked construction, toyed with photography. He kept ending up with bad boys. I have this probation report . . .”

This is all a waste of time. We have no strategy, no leads except for the bit about the white rental car. Nothing of interest. Murders like Zander's and Cassandra's are the hardest to solve. They're dispassionate crimes: killings without rage or greed or impulse or psychosis. Killings that are all in a day's work.

The other two, the murders of Seth Coen and Scud, are a little different. The way Seth was butchered, along with the sloppiness of leaving a shoe print, suggests something less professional. The Bureau isn't sure what to make of Scud's murder. So far we haven't even found the scene of the crime. We need a lucky break.

Dorsey is talking about the gun that killed both Seth and Scud, so I tune back in.

“. . . possibly got in a tussle with Scud, took the gun away, and shot him.”

“Or maybe whoever killed Scud had stolen the gun outright ahead of time,” I say. “See, the thing is—” I stop.

“The thing is what?” someone says.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

I was going to say it could have been someone who knew Scud, knew he had the gun, knew where he kept it, and went and got it for the specific purpose of killing Scud. Something in me tells me to keep my mouth shut. My thinking is . . . It didn't start as a thought, it started as a drop of adrenaline when my subconscious outpaced the march of logic. Maybe Scud's wife used the casual violence of her criminal husband's illicit doings to camouflage a domestic homicide. I remember her on the day we searched her house; disgust oozed out every pore of her outraged face. Was Scud's gun hidden in the house that day, or maybe buried in the yard, or stashed at a friend's? No matter. If she knew of the gun, she could retrieve it. Then it would be a simple matter to come up with the excuse, lure him to a secluded spot, shoot him, dump the body somewhere along the river's unhurried
path. Maybe she even affected a twinkle in her eyes, a “come hither” smile as she suggested a drive, just the two of them, to one of those isolated parks.

This wisp of an idea takes root and grows into something surprising. The beleaguered Mrs. Scud probably had more motive and opportunity than God, but other people also had motive to kill the nettlesome Scud. And where motive leads, opportunity has a way of following. Maybe Scud had the gun at home the day we searched his house and grounds. Maybe it was in the living room or kitchen, where the ubiquitous and mysterious Officer Penhale, in blue surgical gloves, poked through drawers and under couch cushions. Penhale easily could have pocketed the gun. Or it could have been in the bedroom, where my friend the disturbingly quirky Chip d'Villafranca went in ahead of the search team to have a look around. Or in the garage, where I found my other friend, my confidant and ally Upton Cruthers, lingering in the dim light while troopers rummaged utility shelves.